The Lego Party

Phew... its taken a while to get this post on. The challenge of turning te house from a floral vintage tea party to a lego zone in 3 weeks with a 3 month old was a whole heap of busy. Not much I could recycle from one to the other.

So with the Lego Movie out for release on his birthday-eve we couldnt really avoid a Logo Movie link. This was our photo opportunity. The boys piled in together for pictures amonst the giant lego storage which the boy got for his birthday (and got to open a bit early), more lego bricks made from cardboard boxes and crepe paper and this painted wallpaper. I did the circles by drawing round the bowl of the weighing scales and shading in the bottom corner. Needless to say I now have sharpie all over the bowl... oops. Boy was in charge of choosing the font and printing out the Everything Is Awesome. Of course, this song was playing on repeat through the whole party.

GAMES: We split into teams for activities. It is easier to entertain 4 boys at once than all of them. I've learnt that over these years. We started out with a nerf gun shoot out in the back garden which involved a choice of different types of nerf gun in various positions and Lego StarWars Darth Vader's printed onto card for targets. They all played this together before splitting into groups.

Buildionary: So simple. A big tray full of all kinds of bricks and some easy categories printed out and cut into strips. Each member of the groups takes a turn to go out and read the strip and then has to make their word from the lego and without speaking. Like pictionary. Like charades. Like rapidough. Yes, simple.

The Animation Mix-Up (the boy was in charge of the names and the signs. There is not really any mix-up about this game- sorry) This was a little more tricky and required an iPad and an animation app. Joel did this with them outside and they made little mini lego movies where characters walked about and boys T shirts kept appearing in the background for one off pictures as the concept of staying out of shot was a little beyond some excited 8 year olds. The idea was that they would choose a pack of props, a cast pack and a vehicle which were all bagged up in the tub. This meant they all had different things to work with for their movies.

Guess Who: This was by far the most fun game to make. It involved a trip to the Lego Store and to the mini figure station. We have only ever dreamed of this before now but this game gave us the excuse we needed. We dug out all the boys mini figures and selected the ones with most 'character' and then the Lego Store trip provided us with 9 more. We photographed each one and sent them off to be printed a week or so before the party. So each board has 15 characters and those 15 character's photos need to go to the other board. Each team selects a photo and they take turns to ask questions such as 'Do they have something in their hands? and 'Do they have an angry face?' They LOVED this game. Once they had eliminated a character (eg 'Do they have a hat?' 'No'... so all the characters with a hat can be eliminated) they bend them over to show that they are out! My favorite thing about this game is the randomness of the characters. We have a hippy guy with an ice lolly, Santa, Gandalf, a chef holding a croissant and Millhouse from the Simpsons. We play this game a lot now.

PARTY BAGS: As I was sending off for the photos for the 'Guess Who' game I edited one of the stressed space man and we used these for the party bags. I stuck to a pretty simple theme of bright things inside clear packets so these were the same. Clear gift bags with these photos inserted in and ready to fill. The boy wanted our expedit shelves to be set out like a store so each square had a different item in, either for the party table or for the party bags. The gifts for the bags were a lego soap, a brick shaped lolly, a bag of mixed sweets and a small pack of lego bricks.

These soaps were dead easy to make. I ordered some lego sillicone molds as I knew they would come in handy for lots of things and we used the left over melthing soap from the girls party. I made multi coloured soaps with the molds and then once these had set I places them randomly inside the rectangle molds and mixed up a new batch of clear soap with a little green edible glitter (left over from last years OZ party) I poured that in so that it would set around the coloured bricks and the results were quite fun.

Ideally I wanted to make these pops with hard boiled sweets - it wasnt the right kind of mold. I tried and I melted it :( I had to stress about using candy melts instead. I don't get on well with Candy Melts. They dont pay any attention to be whatsoever.

Little packs of assorted bricks.

FOOD and DECORATIONS:

I did enjoy making this cake. This was a 5 layer sponge... I didn't go mad on colours as I thought the outside took care of that... but each layer was a different flavour (chocolate, caramel. banana, vanilla x2). The top layer was cut smaller - which turned out a bit handy as I forgot about one of the layers and cooked it burnt around the edges... so that one was the best for the job. I mushed up the fondant icing with yellow colouring paste and once that was even rolled it out and covered the 2 sections. The bricks are a mixture of candy melt ones I made and some I bought ready done from amazon.

Again we stuck to a simple theme for the party table. These geometric style plates were a bargain from ikea. We did rectangle slices of pizza and the veggies looked great with their bright colours stuffed into lego store pick'n'mix pots.